Switcheroo (12 page)

“What are you saying, Sylvie?” Mildred sputtered. “That you wish you were Bob’s mistress instead of his wife?”

“Yes. Well…no, not exactly.” Sylvie lied. It was shaming to admit it, but right now that
was
part of what she wanted. Of course, she also wanted to see Bob hang from a meat hook. But after he was punished, then what? “She’s the one who’s getting all the affection. She’s the one who gets flowers and gifts. Meanwhile, I’m the one who’s hanging his shirts up, defrosting chicken, and writing to the kids.”

“That’s a wife and mother’s job description.”

“Well, I want a promotion.”

“But you need some quiet time. Sylvie, every woman here has husband trouble. That’s if they
have
a husband. If they don’t, they have boyfriend trouble, or they’re lonely. Half of the ones with husbands are bored by them or can’t stand them. Or they ignore them. The other half are being driven crazy because
they’re
ignored—or they’re suspicious. Nobody has it easy.” Mildred looked out the office door at the crowded shop. “It makes for very good business. You may not be able to cope with your marriage, but you can glaze a hell of a tureen. I feel like I’m providing a community service.”

Mildred began to sweep and sighed. “Time moves on, Sylvie. We grow and we change. Some things we lose. Others we gain. I can tell you I don’t miss menstrual cramps, but sometimes…” She paused and put down the broom. “God! What am I yammering about? Go home, sweetheart. Take a nap. You’ll feel better. Then call me. I’ll come over. We’ll talk some more.”

In the car Sylvie’s thoughts whirled. Her mother hadn’t understood about Marla, about their twin-ship, but who could? You had to see the girl to believe it. In an odd—very odd—way Sylvie thought that perhaps she should feel complimented. Bob hadn’t picked a Spanish señorita with black hair trailing down to her hips. If I lightened my hair, Sylvie thought, and I lost a little weight…If I got rid of these bags under my eyes…Well, she wouldn’t do that to please Bob. She’d much rather poison him. If only he’d eat a meal at home.

Despite her mother’s advice, the idea of being in the same house with Bob made her dizzy. How could she not manage to kill him, or keep her mouth shut after meeting his mistress? Because despite her hurt, despite her outrage, despite her confusion, deep down Sylvie felt that there was something she wasn’t quite grasping that was at the very center of this. Something more important than the simple issue of her injured pride and her husband’s egregious betrayal. There was something that could be learned, but it kept flickering at the edges of her thoughts. She couldn’t bring it into focus.

What did she really want? her mother had asked. Sylvie had thought, only a few days ago, that she had everything she wanted. And she’d been deceiving herself. Life was too precious to waste in a dream state or pursuing a goal you didn’t really desire. What
did
she really want and, once she knew that, how could she get it?

Sylvie lay flat—well, as flat as she could with the mounds that her breasts and her stomach made—on the single bed in Reenie’s room. She couldn’t bear the thought of going into her own bedroom or touching her bed—the bed she had slept on all these years with Bob. But she had to lie down somewhere because she simply didn’t have the strength to stand up for another moment. She stared at the ceiling and felt time pass over her. That is what had happened: time had passed over her and, as it did, minutely, bit by bit, day by day, it had washed away her youth and her freshness and her options and her courage and left behind this thing she had become. She moved one hand to her hip—it took all her energy to do it—and felt the fleshiness there. The last time she’d been to the mall she’d had to buy a size twelve pair of slacks. The saleswoman had assured her they were “European cut” but Sylvie knew she had thickened.

Yet, she told herself, it was natural. She was aging, just like everyone else on the planet. Including that…that…New Age bimbo. Someday (well, probably in about eleven years) that poor addled tramp will have thickened too. The nice definition between her rib cage and her waist would smooth out into a flat line. And her butt would sag.

Yet, until then, it seemed that Bob preferred her to his own wife. Tears began to fill Sylvie’s eyes, but she blinked them away. She was too angry and too shocked to cry. Yet she was vindicated. She wasn’t crazy, or oversensitive, or paranoid. Even her mother had been wrong. Bob
was
ignoring her. No wonder he hadn’t noticed when she changed her perfume or wore that new nightgown. No wonder he hadn’t tried to make her feel guilty about the car in the pool. He was putting something inappropriate into something inappropriate himself. And no wonder he had given her the car in the first place. When you had a car lot, a car was the easiest gift in the world to give. He’d given one to his mistress. Sylvia wondered who else he had given cars to. Their dry cleaner?

She also wondered when was the last time Bob had really noticed, really thought about her? She clenched her fists. This nightmare was the kind of thing that happened to other people, other less fortunate women. It happened to Rosalie, but she had always been…well, shrewish. It happened to women who chose obvious Lotharios for husbands. It happened to Sandie Thomas. But it didn’t happen to her. She’d been a really good wife. She hadn’t ignored Bob to focus on the children. She hadn’t nagged. She’d been interested in his hobbies. She hadn’t let herself go—much. For God’s sake, she’d gone fly-fishing with him three years in a row. And she hadn’t just kept his home, she’d also kept their musical life going. She’d taken him to concerts, they’d played duets. This kind of thing
did not happen to her
. She wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t blind, and she wasn’t a victim.

But it had happened.

It had also happened to her mother.

Sylvie felt as if she were sinking into Reenie’s mattress, as if she weighed not just a dozen pounds more than she should but a thousand, or a million. She felt as if she could sink right through the mattress and the box spring, through the floor, down into the basement, and then, her density increasing, right down to the center of the earth. She was sure she would never be able to stand up again, much less walk.

But when she remembered that moment—that shock of seeing her own more youthful face staring at her from inside that woman’s apartment—Sylvie had to admit that this was not just the usual dalliance. Even now, she would swear that Bob had never cheated on her before. Even now, with her heart and her belly and her fists and her thighs all feeling heavier than an imploding star, she had to admit that in selecting Marla Molensky, her younger twin, Bob hadn’t been completely rejecting her. Well, he’d been rejecting her, Sylvie Schiffer, but he’d selected her, or something very like her. He’d selected her as she had been.

The thought wasn’t just a rationalization. The resemblance was too startling. Despite the heaviness of her heart, Sylvie felt somewhere, in the very center of herself, that Bob had fallen into this affair, made his selection, looking for a Sylvie. Maybe not Sylvie as she was right now, but Sylvie as she had been. Yes. He wanted her. He just wanted the old her.

That idea both horrified and galvanized her. She got up from Reenie’s narrow bed and, like a sleepwalker, like Frankenstein’s wife, she made her way over to the full-length mirror on the back of Reenie’s closet door. She stared at her reflection.

Of course, her hair was wildly disheveled, her eyes red, and her face pale—except for the splotches on her cheeks that she got when she was very angry. Sylvie, in slow motion, began to unbutton her blouse. She dropped it to the floor and then struggled with the too tight button on her slacks. She let them fall to her ankles and stepped out of them, flipping off her shoes. Next she reached behind herself and took off her bra, dropping it to the floor as her breasts dropped as well. Last, she stripped off her panties and stood there, naked except for the little gold cross that she wore around her neck. Then she remembered that Bob had given it to her on their fifth anniversary and she pulled it off too, letting it fall to the floor with the other flotsam and jetsam. It took all her courage then, but she pulled herself together and looked into the mirror.

The light from the window wasn’t harsh—Reenie’s room faced north—but a clear white illumination. Sylvie looked at herself in her daughter’s mirror. When had those bags under her eyes filled in with fat? And when had the two sides of her jaw, each bit beside the corner of her mouth, begun to hang like that? She put her hand up to her throat. When had it gone so soft? She lowered her eyes to her chest. She was covered with little freckles and discolorations all across her breastbone. And her breasts!

Her breasts had never been overly large. She used to really like her breasts. Now she stared and wondered when the nipples had started pointing down instead of up. She remembered the stupid pencil test—the girls in school had always said you had to wear a bra if your breasts hung low enough against your chest cavity so that you could hold a pencil the thickness of a cigarette there. My God! She could secrete a Royal Macanudo cigar and no one would be the wiser. Sylvie continued her examination. Her belly had filled out. She was used to a little round mound, but this was more. When she was younger, even the roundness was cute. Somehow now, the lumpiness and the look of the flesh, her own flesh, was unattractive. And then came her thighs! She looked at the dimpled cellulite. When had she become The Pillsbury Doughboy? Once past the thighs her legs weren’t so bad—but as she stared she noticed two or three places where the veins were beginning to come close to the skin. Were they varicose?

She looked down, away from the mirror, directly at her own body. Despite the slight bulge of her stomach, she could see her pubic hair. Was it sparser than it had been? And—oh my god—was that a gray hair among the others?

How had this happened without her noticing it? Had she been too busy with the kids, her music, her students, the house and the garden to notice? She had become a middle-aged woman!

It was, of course, inevitable. She simply had not thought it was going to happen so soon. Forty wasn’t old. Somehow she wouldn’t have minded so much if she thought she was loved. But now, realizing that Bob had so little interest in her, Sylvie despised what she saw. Ten years ago—even five—she’d been able to hold it together. At thirty she could pass for twenty-two. She’d been carded once when she was thirty-one (and the bar was dark). At thirty-seven she still didn’t look her age. But somehow it had all caught up with her. The ten years, or eleven, or whatever the difference was from that other woman were the years where some irreparable change took place, where the rubber hit the road. Sylvie’s only comfort was that all of these changes would happen to that hussy too. She would stand before a mirror just like this someday. But, in the meantime, Marla was flawless.

Sylvie looked at herself in the mirror again and blushed. She felt the flush move down her neck and heat her chest. Every time Bob looked at her in the last few months he must have compared her to that other woman, the one with the skin that was still elastic, with the hands that were smooth. How humiliating! Sylvie had to turn away from the mirror. She took Reenie’s old dressing gown down from its hook and wrapped herself in the big flannel robe.

When was the last time she and Bob had made love? She’d joked when she told her mother fifty-six days. But how long was it? She tried to remember. Not since before the children left for school. And she wasn’t sure whether they had tried during the summer. Could it be that long? Almost four months? They’d been married forever, and there had been dry spells, but they’d never gone as long as this. Sylvie held her hand out to steady herself against the wall. When would she make love again? Maybe never. How could she possibly ever make love to Bob after this? And she couldn’t even think of another man in her future.

In truth, Sylvie had never expected much drama in life. She felt as if she made her own world and was responsible for her own happiness. But she wasn’t ready to be counted out. She wasn’t ready to give up carnal pleasure or be relegated to the discard pile.

Bob had found somebody new, yet still had all the safety of familiarity. Bob was making love to another woman, a woman who looked just like Sylvie had looked a decade earlier. Bob was turning back the clock.

But for Sylvie, what answer was there?

Sylvie was sitting in Dr. John Spencer’s office, but she couldn’t sit for long. Instead, she began to pace. The usual framed official stuff was on the walls: medical school degrees, awards for community service and the like. There was also a big picture of John’s deceased wife Nora and dozens of pictures of the two of them together. Too bad they’d never had children, Sylvie thought. Nora hadn’t been able to conceive. John would have been a good father, and if they’d had kids, he wouldn’t be alone now. The way I soon will be. Sylvie, still too anxious to sit down, kept pacing back and forth. When John put his head out of the office, she was upon him.

“Sylvie, are you okay? My nurse said—”

Sylvie put up a hand to stop him from talking and shook her head. She was using all of her control not to cry. It seemed to be the only thing she’d been doing successfully lately. He gestured for her to follow him down the hall.

“I need an EKG,” she told John as they entered his office.

He turned to look at her with concern. “Are you having chest pains? Is this an emergency?”

“Yes. I need an emergency face-lift. And liposuction.”

“A face-lift? Why?” He took her hand. “Sylvie, what’s wrong?”

“Everything. Bob’s cheating on me. And I saw her. She looks just like me, but younger. Just like me, but no crow’s-feet. Just like me, but without the second chin.”

John sat down heavily in his desk chair and steepled his fingers. “I’m very sorry, Sylvie.”

Sylvie nodded. “I’m not even going to ask if you knew about how Bob was spending his free time. You’re too good a friend to both of us to have to take sides.” She crumpled into the chair facing John and allowed one tear to slide out of her eye. John got up from his desk, moved to Sylvie, and was about to take her into his arms when she felt him hesitate, just for a second. Sylvie knew about John’s deep feelings for her, and it was a comfort. John may have wanted to put his arms around her, but he only touched her in a doctorly way. Now his arms could have been a bulwark against her sexlessness.